Via the AP – Vanessa Arrington apparently just fell from the tree – we have shocking news that fidel castro will most probabaly not return to power in December as previously reported by Cuban government mouthpieces:
Cuban official recants Castro prediction
By VANESSA ARRINGTON, Associated Press WriterHAVANA – Cuba’s foreign minister backed away Monday from his prediction that Fidel Castro will return to power by early December, raising questions about the pace of the communist leader’s recovery from intestinal surgery.
Felipe Perez Roque also told The Associated Press that there was no guarantee that Castro would be well enough to attend the postponed celebration of his 80th birthday on Dec. 2. Castro turned 80 on Aug. 13 but announced delayed festivities when he told Cubans of his surgery in late July.
Perez Roque had told the AP in September that he expected Castro to be fully back at the helm by early December, and when asked about the birthday celebrations had said: “I have no questions in my mind that we will be able to celebrate his birthday in December as he deserves.”
Play me the world’s smallest violin!
Wow. I’m. Underwhelmed.
I can’t wait to see that little cabezón flee for his life when the house of cards comes crumbling down. Him and that Alarcon. There’s nobody I’d like to kick in the nuts more than Alarcon.
My father is dead and this hijo de puta’s heart is still beating? What is he waiting for?
Take heart Venti, that cold heart may be beating, but not for long.
It seems fitting that Fidel Castro is sure to realize his power is gone. His ego is surely bursting……
Hey, Val:
What with tomorrow’s vote, thought this was interesting. . . –lg
Commentary: Latinos likely losers no matter what
POSTED: 11:33 a.m. EST, November 6, 2006
By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
Special to CNN
Adjust font size:
SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) — There’s a phrase in Spanish that Latinos use to tell one another to be careful and watch out for surprises: ojo, mucho ojo. It means keep an eye out.
That’s good advice as Latinos contemplate what immigration reform will look like if Democrats on Tuesday retake control of the House of Representatives, as now seems likely.
Bear in mind, the hard-liners on immigration reform — who rail against amnesty, who pander to racists and who prefer sound bites to solutions — are in the House of Representatives.
So the prospect of House Republicans going down in flames would seem to be great news for those Latinos who support giving at least some of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States a conditional path to legal residency.
But hold on. Ojo, mucho ojo.
Just because a GOP-controlled House of Representatives screwed up immigration reform six ways from Sunday doesn’t mean that House Democrats will do any better, or that they’ll even feel compelled to try. Remember this is the same bunch of cowards whose leadership, a few months ago, produced a 25-page booklet laying out what they intended to accomplish if they won control of the House. The booklet left out any mention of immigration reform beyond that piece of low-hanging fruit: border security.
Political experts agreed that Democrats were terrified that the immigration issue would hurt them in conservative districts. Hispanic Democrats were furious and publicly criticized the leaders of their own party for dodging the immigration issue.
Now, my hunch is that we’re even less likely to see anything resembling amnesty for illegal immigrants under a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives than we were when the Republicans ran things.
Three reasons:
With Republicans in charge, you had their benefactors in the business community pushing hard for legalization in the hopes that it might provide additional workers. Democrats’ benefactors are in organized labor, which has — in the last decade or so — come around to supporting legalization but not if it’s tied to a guest worker program, which might be the only way that Republicans would sign on;
Once Democrats taste power, they’re going to like it, and they’re going to want to keep it. So they’re likely to keep their heads down and not do anything that might increase the likelihood that voters will take a corrective action in 2008 and bounce them back into the minority. At the top of the list is passing anything that looks, sounds or smells like amnesty;
And Democrats won’t think twice about betraying their Latino supporters on this issue because they take Latino votes for granted anyway. They haven’t come up with a new strategy for getting Latino votes since the 1950s when Texas Democrats used to parachute into Hispanic neighborhoods at election time with tacos and beer.
So it’s a safe bet that, even if Democrats retake the House of Representatives, Latinos eventually will come out on the losing end.
The question is: What will they do about it?
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune and a nationally syndicated columnist. Read his column at http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/op-ed/navarrette/index.html.
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It was actually congressional Democrats that sabotaged the president’s immigration reform bill. Tancredo et al got a lot of the pub but they weren’t the ones responsible for blocking the guest worker program.
http://www.uniontribune.org/news/op-ed/navarrette/20060412-9999-lz1e12navarre.html
Blame the Democrats for immigration reform failure
April 12, 2006
Who killed immigration reform? The autopsy shows it was Senate Democrats.
It’s tempting to put a pox on both parties. But it wouldn’t be fair. Republicans were tireless in search of comprehensive, and bipartisan, reform. Sen. John McCain of Arizona joined with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to draft the guest-worker legislation, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter made that legislation central to what his committee sent to the full Senate. Sens. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina and Sam Brownback of Kansas were vocal in their support. Sens. Mel Martinez of Florida and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska offered a helpful compromise. And Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist showed leadership by reaching out to the other side.
Too bad you can’t say the same for Democratic leader Harry Reid, who was the villain in this drama.
Hector Flores, president of the League of United Latin-American Citizens, told me that he tried to impress upon Reid’s office that it was important to get immigration reform done.
“Apparently, it fell on deaf ears,” Flores said.
Reid claims it was GOP hard-liners who killed reform by running roughshod over Frist.
Baloney. The hard-liners had – by all accounts – no more than 30 votes, including those of conservative Democrats. On the other side, you had – according to McCain – as many as 70 votes.
A deal was at hand that would have offered legal status to some illegal immigrants. It would have made the GOP seem more Latino-friendly, but it would also have infuriated organized labor, which opposes something that was in the mix: guest workers.
After the Senate Judiciary Committee put out a guest-worker bill, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney issued a statement saying: “Guest-workers programs are a bad idea and harm all workers.”
That did it. Senate Democrats sided with labor and sold out Latinos. The deal came undone because Reid refused to allow the legislation to go through the amendment process. Republicans had come up with as many as 400 amendments but whittled the list to 20. Reid agreed to proceed with debate on just three.
It was a masterstroke by Democrats. Labor is happy. And while Latinos are angry, there’s always the chance that Democrats can fool them into channeling that anger toward Republicans.
Remarkably, it’s working. At a protest in Washington Monday, one Latina held up a sign that read: “The GOP is losing my Latino vote.” At another protest in Dallas, someone handed out registration leaflets urging demonstrators to vote Democratic.
Some Latino leaders don’t think it’ll be that easy. Cecilia Munoz, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, told me: “I don’t believe that it’s wise for Democrats to come to our community and ask for votes by saying: ‘Hey, we kept an immigration bill from going forward.’ … People understand when they’re being used.”
Even so, it looks like Reid and the Democrats orchestrated the perfect deception. Trouble is, they left fingerprints.
The Washington Post said in an editorial: “Democrats – whether their motive was partisan advantage or legitimate fear of a bad bill emerging from conference with the House – are the ones who refused, in the end, to proceed with debate on amendments, which is, after all, how legislation gets made.”
Frank Sharry, the executive director of the liberal National Immigration Forum, said in a statement: “We cannot escape the conclusion that the Democratic Senate leadership was more interested in keeping the immigration issue alive in the run-up to midterms than in enacting immigration reform legislation.”
And Sen. Kennedy told The Associated Press: “Politics got ahead of policy on this.” He then refused, according to the article, to defend Reid’s performance. The story noted that, “Outside the Senate, several Democratic strategists concluded that the best politics was to allow the bill to die.”
The moral: Marches and Mexican flags don’t equal power. Labor uses millions of dollars in political contributions to take care of Democrats, and so Democrats take care of labor.
After the bill died, Democrats rubbed salt in the wound by insisting that Latinos had no choice but to stay on the liberal hacienda. Susan Estrich, who served as campaign manager for Michael Dukakis in 1988, told Fox News that Republicans had blown their chance to win Latino votes and predicted that Latino support would help Democrats win both houses of Congress.
You see, in a twist on the famous words of one of their icons, Democrats no longer ask what they can do for Latinos, only what Latinos can do for them.
Navarrette can reached via e-mail at ruben.navarrette@uniontrib.com.
fidel you are in my thoughts and prayers.
The thought of you dead makes me very happy and I pray it will be a painful death.
El es muerto, Jaime.